Crisp-Ellert Art Museum to screen ‘The Joycean Society’

Mar 22, 2017

Crisp-Ellert Art Museum artist-in-residence and curator Staci Bu Shea will host a screening of the film “The Joycean Society” by screenwriter and director Dora Garcia on Wednesday, April 5 at 6:30 p.m., followed by a conversation with Flagler College Professor Dr. Craig Woelfel.

According to independent film site Film Affinity, “The Joycean Society” tells the story of a group of people who have been reading a book together for 30 years. They have been reading it again and again, with each journey from the first to the last page taking 11 years. Once they reach the last word, a very enigmatic "the," they begin again with the first word, "riverrun." The text appears inexhaustible, its interpretation endless, the inconclusive nature of the reading exciting. The world seems to cease existing outside this reading room or, perhaps, it exists because of it.

Woelfel teaches modern British, American and Postcolonial Literature in the English Department at Flagler. His research interests focus on literary modernism, and particularly the intersection of art and aesthetics, intellectual history and secularization. That intersection is the focus of his book, forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press, titled “Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief.” He has also published work on T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Dante.

Bu Shea has organized a film program as part of her Spring residency at CEAM titled “The shape of my kin networks looks more like a trellis or an esplanade than a tree.” The program is titled after a line from Donna Haraway's “The Companion Species Manifesto,” a book that Staci is continuously rereading throughout the residency, to emphasize the weaving of relationships, practices and objects as an organizing form and methodology. The program focuses on group practices toward a task that is never single, and features three screenings with special invited guests to talk about each documentary film: “Every Little Thing” by Nicolas Philibert with Carolyn Lazard (February 22), “Nightcleaners” by Berwick Street Collective with Rachael Rakes (March 8), and “The Joycean Society” (2013) by Garcia with Dr. Woelfel (April 5). For more information about Bu Shea’s residency, please visit here.

Kenan 300 is on the third floor and is wheelchair accessible via the elevator. There is a single stall, wheelchair accessible restroom available on the third floor. This space is not scent-free, but we do ask that attendees come fragrance-free. If you require ASL interpretation for the conversation portion of the program, or have any other access needs, please contact Julie Dickover at jdickover@flagler.edu, by 3 p.m on Friday, March 31.

The CEAM Artist Residency is supported by a grant from the Dr. JoAnn Crisp-Ellert Fund at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida.